Refugees drown, are beaten, and are pushed back at the borders of the states of the Global North. Moral outrage is understandable in the face of such treatment. But does it constitute a good political theory? Can morality supply us with good normative arguments for a political world? In this article, I argue that they cannot. Drawing on political realism, I show why moral arguments for admitting refugees fail. What we require is not the extrapolation of moral arguments onto a political world, but a new form of political normativity that is derived from how politics works. I show that refugeehood possesses a specific political function in international politics. States do not admit refugees based on humanitarian reasons. This is what moral arguments get wrong. Rather, they fulfill the political function of condemning and embarrassing other states, of building oppositional and military forces to undermine rival political systems both ideologically and materially. In other words, they play an important political role—a role that allows us to build normative arguments from within a political and not a moral understanding of the world.

Many theorists argue that justice in international migration requires states to maximize the openness of their borders, even when that can only be done by denying full political membership to some migrants. In contrast, this article contends that democratic ideals recommend inclusion as the guiding principle of migration policy, since full membership for all the state’s residents is the only way to preserve democratic self-rule, whereas the justice- and freedom-related goals associated with openness can be promoted via other means. I define full inclusion as involving not only formal rights, but also solidarity. Against accounts that define solidarity in terms of shared identity (i.e., a specific commonality), I argue that democratic solidarity requires intersubjective “identification” among members of the demos, oriented toward their shared future. This account suggests how migration policy might advance the practical goal of more open borders, along with other moral goals associated with calls for greater openness, without sacrificing important democratic ideals.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a watershed moment in European politics. The invasion prompted a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient in recent decades. We study public opinion toward refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with two rounds of original survey data from 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments coupled with detailed settlement-level demographic data to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.

It is well established that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions during his candidacy and presidency endorsed existing group-based social hierarchies, helping to boost his support among white Americans, especially men and those without a college degree. But how did these endorsements shape support for Trump among non-white Americans? Extant theories suggest that these actions should have pushed racial and ethnic minority voter support for the GOP candidate to its lowest observed levels in contemporary political history. Yet Trump outperformed these expectations in 2016 and in 2020 among Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. We propose the same embrace of social hierarchies that motivated white support for Trump also motivated the political preferences and behaviors of a significant number of non-white Americans. Using several national large-N surveys conducted between 2011 and 2021 with large samples of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans, we explore how support for existing status hierarchies—both gender and racial—engendered support for Trump across racial and ethnic groups and discuss implications for the future of electoral politics in a rapidly diversifying United States.

States and interest groups are facilitating a redistribution of government powers under a new courts-first federalism. States are working to claw back powers while interest groups drafting model laws strategically tailor them to skirt the limits of federal law and, once adopted by states, prompt federal courts to review them as parties litigate to clarify their rights. States do not need to be completely successful in litigation to shift the balance of state–national power. Testing this argument, we find that the US Supreme Court grants review to 17% of model laws in our sample produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whereas merely 1% of other cases are granted certiorari. Ultimately, the states and ALEC were partly successful in constraining federal power. Thus, the combination of model legislation, impact litigation, and courts-first federalism becomes a tool for states to draw power to themselves and from the federal government.

Administrative agencies have undertaken an increasingly substantial role in policymaking. Yet the influence-seeking that targets these agencies remains poorly understood. Reporting exceptions under the Lobbying Disclosure Act allow many of the most powerful advocates to characterize their activity as lawyering, not lobbying, and thereby fly under the radar. Using agency-generated records on lobbying activity, financial reporting, and personnel databases specific to lawyers, as well as LinkedIn, we describe a vast subterranean world of regulatory influence-seeking that the social-science literature has (mostly) ignored. Regulatory lobbying is systematically different from legislative lobbying. It involves different kinds of people and different lobbying firms that bring specific forms of expertise and distinct networks. Our key findings about how regulatory lobbying differs include the following: (1) the regulatory lobbying sector is highly segregated from the reported lobbying sector, with many regulatory advocates failing to consistently register or report earnings commensurate with their activity level, (2) the number of unregistered regulatory advocates working on the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act plausibly exceeds 150% of the registered lobbyists working on that law, (3) the most effective regulatory lobbyists and law firms involved with regulatory lobbying have incomes that dramatically outpace leading reported lobbying firms (which are also mostly law firms), and (4) back-of-the-envelope calculations and more sophisticated decomposition regressions imply that aggregate expenditure on lawyer-lobbying is several multiples of reported lobbying spending. We introduce the case of a particular lawyer-lobbyist and provide a theoretical discussion to situate and contextualize these findings. Collectively, this work opens a window into neglected domains of politics and reveals an important and understudied form of political inequality.

The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases encompassing voting rights, racial discrimination, religious conscience protections, and other hot-button issues, I argue that drifting policies possess several sources of legal resilience: injuries are difficult to identify; judges can be persuaded of the merits of restraint, textual formalism, and bright-line rules; and policy makers plausibly deny any intentional action in pursuit of controversial outcomes. Drift is not an automatic and unremarkable process of continual policy change but rather the outcome of high-stakes political and legal contestation over how rigid policy thresholds and categories should be adapted to meet shifting conditions.

We examine why public support for democracy in Ukraine increased after Russia’s 2014 intervention and surged after Russia’s 2022 invasion—despite concerns that the wartime quest for security would diminish support for political freedoms. We statistically analyze original data generated as part of annual opinion surveys by the Institute of Sociology at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences in 2017 (N = 2,199), 2018 (N = 1,800), and a 2021–22 panel survey with the same respondents (N = 475) interviewed before and after Russia’s invasion. Our findings indicate that wartime support for democracy is in significant respects geosocietal—arising from the mobilization of civic national identity conditioned by salient geopolitical threats. Civic pride, attribution of threat to an external authoritarian aggressor, and war onset were the strongest and most robust predictors of multiple democracy support indicators, overriding personal loss and stress. The findings call for more attention to the interaction of geopolitical and social contexts shaping political attitudes, with implications for democratic futures globally.

Gun ownership is a highly consequential political behavior. It often signifies a belief about the inadequacy of state-provided security and leads to membership in a powerful political constituency. As a result, it is important to understand why people buy guns and how shifting purchasing patterns affect the composition of the broader gun-owning community. We address these topics by exploring the dynamics of the gun-buying spike that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was one of the largest in American history. We find that feelings of diffuse threat prompted many individuals to buy guns. Moreover, we show that new gun owners, even more than buyers who already owned guns, exhibit strong conspiracy and anti-system beliefs. These findings have substantial consequences for the subsequent population of gun owners and provide insight into how social disruptions can alter the nature of political groups.

Why do some conspiracy theories (CTs) remain popular and continue to spread on social media while others quickly fade away? Situating conspiracy theories within the literature on social movements, we propose and test a new theory of how enduring CTs maintain and regain popularity online. We test our theory using an original, hand-coded dataset of 5,794 tweets surrounding a divisive and regularly commemorated set of CTs in Poland. We find that CTs that cue in-group and out-group threats garner more retweets and likes than CT tweets lacking this rhetoric. Surprisingly, given the extant literature on party leaders’ ability to shape political attitudes and behaviors, we find that ruling party tweets endorsing CTs gain less engagement than CT tweets from non-officials. Finally, when a CT’s main threat frames are referenced in current events, CTs re-gain popularity on social media. Given the centrality of CTs to populist rule, these results offer a new explanation for CT popularity—one focused on the conditions under which salient threat frames strongly resonate.

While the origins and consequences of populist attitudes in adults are being studied extensively, it is still unknown when populist attitudes might emerge in a person’s life. Drawing on the existing literature on political socialization, we focus on populist attitudes during adolescence and explore the contributing role of negative relationships with parents, peers, and teachers. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of populist attitudes among a representative sample of children aged 12 to 18 (mean: 14.66 years) using a unique dataset gathered through interviews conducted in schools in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (n=3,123). Our findings reveal a strong association between perceived unjust teacher behavior and the level of populist attitudes in adolescents, while the connection of peers and parents with populist attitudes appears to be limited. Further analyses using panel data from the UK support these findings.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a natural process where microbes develop the ability to survive the antimicrobial drugs we depend upon to treat and prevent deadly infections, such as antibiotics. This microscopic evolution is further propelled by human activities, where each use of an antimicrobial drug potentially induces AMR. As microbes can spread quickly from animals to humans and travel around the world through humanity’s global circuits of movement, the use of any antimicrobial drug has potentially global consequences. As human-induced AMR occurs, mortality and morbidity increase due to increasingly or sometimes completely ineffective antimicrobial treatments. This article considers AMR as a product of the evolving and complex interplay between human societies and invisible microbial worlds. It argues that as a political challenge, AMR requires robust institutions that can manage human–microbial interactions to minimize the emergence of drug resistance and maximize the likelihood of achieving effective antimicrobial use for all. Yet, current governance systems for AMR are ill-equipped to meet these goals. We propose a conceptual paradigm shift for global AMR governance efforts, arguing that global governance could better address AMR if approached as a socioecological problem in need of sustainable management rather than solely as a medical problem to be solved. In biodiversity governance, institutions are designed to fit the biological features of the ecosystems that they are attempting to manage. We consider how a similar approach can improve global AMR governance. Employing the concept of ecological fit, which is defined as the alignment between human social systems and biological ecosystems, we diagnose 18 discrepancies between the social institutions that currently govern AMR and the ecological nature of this problem. Drawing from lessons learned in biodiversity governance, the article proposes five institutional design principles for improving the fit and effectiveness of global AMR governance.

The importance and impact of feminist mobilization across borders is well documented, but the impact of autonomy as an aspect of such organizing has not been explored in the transnational context. We argue that to understand the impact of transnational feminist mobilization, at least two distinct types of feminist mobilization require further conceptual development and empirical exploration in the transnational context, namely, autonomous as contrasted with multilateral mobilization. We offer a conceptual framework for distinguishing and studying these two forms. Further, using a mixed-methods study design, we empirically distinguish domestic and transnational dimensions of feminist activism and illuminate the impact of both multilateral feminist organizing and autonomous feminist organizing in the transnational space. Our analysis reveals that domestic and transnational organizing are distinct but related phenomena. We also find that in online organizing spaces, autonomous feminist campaigns amplify the messaging of geographically dispersed grassroots and individual activists more than multilateral ones. It further suggests that autonomous movements may offer more potential for representing marginalized groups of women, though this potential may not always be realized. The paper offers new concepts and empirical insights for the study of transnational feminism, thereby enabling a new research agenda. Further, this research contributes to the study of the ways that Transnational Social Movements can enrich global civil society and deepen global democracy.

Political scientists conceptualize climate politics as a distributive struggle between emerging green and incumbent fossil coalitions. We argue that, even though this conceptualization is historically accurate, a dichotomous understanding no longer fully explains conflicts over climate policy. Importantly, it misses a group of industries that are central to recent policy progress: the decarbonizable sector. Decarbonizable industries, such as automakers or energy-intensive manufacturers, have long been part of fossil coalitions but can develop new sources of competitiveness through decarbonization. This makes them receptive to a bargain: agreeing to meet climate goals in exchange for policies that support their decarbonization, especially fiscal policies that partially fund or de-risk their business transitions. We establish this argument using an original measurement of the size of the decarbonizable sector and corroborate our findings through case studies of green spending policies in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

While scholars consider the global democratic deficit a key issue, we know little about citizens’ perceptions in this regard. To what extent and why do citizens perceive global democratic deficiencies? I conceptualize deficiencies absolutely and relatively—theorizing countries, knowledge, and framing as explanatory factors. Between 2018 and 2021, I conducted survey experiments on around 42,000 respondents in 17 highly diverse countries. Contrary to many scholarly assessments, I find that most people do not perceive major global democratic deficiencies, in the sense that global governance is generally not perceived as highly undemocratic in absolute terms and more democratic than developing democracies. However, the results vary by the object and aspect of inquiry: World politics (versus international organizations) and input (versus output) are perceived as less democratic. Plus, neither gains in relevant knowledge nor common framings affect public perceptions, which are thus quite robust. These findings add novel evidence to debates about global governance.

New lines of theorizing in international relations don’t appear very often. Realism proudly proclaims a lineage of 2,500-odd years. Liberalism, in its various forms, traces its roots back several centuries. The appearance and spread of constructivism in the 1990s thus invite explanation. In this essay we explore the “construction of constructivism”—both the conditions of possibility for intellectual change and the goals of scholars proposing it. Constructivism’s success was both unexpected and, in some ways, unintended. Proponents of existing theories remained (and remain) confident in their own tools and early constructivists often had modest goals. Constructivism took off for at least two broad reasons. One was the intellectual landscape of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was a period when IR theory in the United States had sharply narrowed its concerns, leaving mainstream scholarship on the back foot when the USSR collapsed, and the Cold War ended. The second set of reasons lay in the nature of the constructivist ideas, themselves. Intellectually, constructivist ideas had a plasticity and capaciousness that other IR theories did not. Theoretically, it is a social theory, not specific to IR, which made it useful for tackling a broad range of problems. Empirically, it was portable and open to political analysis at all levels and in all places. Methodologically, it was pluralistic; scholars can and have used diverse methods to explore its claims. In this situation, constructivist scholars, overwhelmingly young and untenured, worked hard to carve out a niche for themselves in the field. That these ideas caught on and became broadly popular has surprised us as much as anyone.